Insanity
by DedicatedWallflower
Summary: I don't feel anything, not my mind, not my body that has dropped limp to the floor. And it takes me back to a nothing when he was with me. And I live again. He was like a drug, she was an addict. He was insanity, she was insane. Together they were like a wildfire, death that could not be contained.


He disappeared four days after we robbed the house. I was left to be lost in my own world of misery. He took most of the things we stole with him. The pearl necklace, a pile of smashed glass, and dozens of decorations were forgotten, like me.

I came to my conclusion then, wondering how someone who claimed to love me so much could leave me so quickly. Love is sterile, love is not deep, nor wild, but it is a cold and desolate slate. It yearns to be ignored and thrown out and it aches to be washed away by the rain that bashes at the earth.

Two days after he left, the police busted through our front door. They found me passed out in the bathtub. I was nearly hypothermic from the running shower that beat a torrent of loathing water down on me for two days.

No one truly knows how I got back to the apartment, or why I was nearly dead, but I have no doubt that it was him who carried me back. Knowing Gale Hawthorne he dragged me to cab, reassured the driver, paid him double maybe triple, and left me for dead as if meant nothing more.

When I woke up, it was like all my sanity had been carried away. It had been stolen by the same boy who picked the lock with ease and laughed when he knocked over the picture frames on the mantel. The family looked so happy in those pictures, they were sitting on beaches, giggling at picnics. That should have been one of my many clues.

Now I know, those feelings I felt for him, they weren't real. It was fear that drew me to him, the same fear that kept my mother addicted to my father, even when she was bruised and broken by his wicked fists.

Insanity. That's what got me out of the criminal charges. They say I'm crazy. I don't know what I am. So they dropped me off in a hospital and strapped me to a bed for days as I screamed at the walls, blaming them for my misfortunes. Then, one day I just stopped. They unstrapped me, and let me roam my room, even talk to doctors.

The one in front of me is old, bald, and unrelenting. We've been here for an hour … maybe two.

"What do you remember about Mr. Hawthorne?" The voice is like a clouded vision in my head, provoking memories that I have attempted to lock in realms unknown to even my soul. I can feel myself awakening, fluttering as I remember him and the madness that always surrounded us. It terrifies me that my body still reacts to even the slightest mention of his name. It's like a zap of light, a jolt that reminds me of the evil that plagues my living.

I hate him, or I try.

"We met." I pause, readjusting the boxy gown as I stare out the window at the sheets of rain that pummel the ground below "We met in college I think." My voice scratches, catching on the remainder of the feral screams that ripped through me the night before in what the staff call 'one of my fits'.

"Are you sure, Miss Everdeen?" he asks, looking at me over thick rimmed glasses. His bald head seems to shine in the white light that floods the small room.

"No." is all I whisper back.

"Think harder."

So I do. All that comes back to me is pure recklessness, lunacy surrounding the contemplations of my mind. As alive as I feel, I can't begin to unravel the thread of my thoughts.

"No, it was when we were little, we were friends..." I trail off, still watching the rain pound against the earth. It viciously floods everything like a massive wave.

"Were?" the man adjusts his coat behind me. I know he's writing down the things I say in a leather bound journal of secrets that lies atop his clipboard.

"He left, no I did." I pause again, trying my hardest to keep the memories of him at bay, nothing good ever came from anything we did together. "We reconnected … geology 101, 423 Rockden Hall, two twenty, three thirty, four, no three days." I frantically murmur, covering my ears to drown out the deafening silence from the world around me as if it could make a difference.

"You are safe here." Is all the man says. I feel his eyes boring a hole into my back. He lies.

"Safe, we were unstable." I take my hands off my ears, "but he loved me, did you know that?" A frown barely graces my lips as I watch the rain, wondering what it would feel like to stand out in the pelting water. I watch them as I ponder the sting that my body would feel from the giant water droplets as they rocket towards the earth.

"There was this diner, it was so lovely, two eggs, order of pancakes, bowl of fruit, two coffees, one black, one with cream and three sugars." It's almost as if I can hear him ordering again, of course that was before everything happened, and before the world was shaken and everything I could have possibly known was mangled and broken like frames that held that happy family.

"You went on many dates with Mr. Hawthorne then?"

"Yes."

Smoke and bars fill my mind, gold and green. "Just take these" he had whispered, his eyes used to gleam in the light with uncanny ability, and then I forgot how to feel; no words, no hands, nothing could stop my invincibility.

Wrong, it was so wrong. I shake my head, ripping at my hair as I try to rid myself of the memories that plague me. Even the beating of my fists on my skull only touch the surface.

What I've become cannot be beaten.

"Make it stop, make it stop," I scream.

The doctor still makes no move to help me. There is no attempt to sedate me with whatever drug he has in his pocket this time. They've done it many times before. Stuck me with shots that make me forget I've been driven crazy, sometimes even forget I'm trying to live. I crave the drugs that can take away my mind again. But He just watches me, and I grow angry, I want to throw him out the window and watch the rain wash him away. Just for a second I want to be free of it all.

"Why are you so afraid of remembering him, Miss Everdeen?" His question gets me to turn away from the window, looking straight into the soul of the demon doctor in his white lab coat.

I know Gale Hawthorne is gone.

He's probably back in New York, hiding from the city downpour in some deli, smiling at the girl who serves him his coffee.

She won't know it now, but some day she's going to stand over death. She will be in this gown, talking to a doctor, craving a drug that will make her forget that she is truly a killer. And then, she will realize too, that his love was not real. That his words, his pills, his life cannot come without price.

She will know that love is a barren wasteland, and her mind will be taken just as mine has.

"Because." I smirk at the doctor, taking a few steps closer to him with eyes dazed and mind crazed. His hand moves towards his pocket … finally.

I barely even feel the prick in my neck, laughing as I stare out at the water bashing the windows. I don't feel anything, not my mind, not my body that has dropped limp to the floor. And it takes me back to a nothing when he was with me.

And I live again.


End file.
